Today we* have been running some performance tests on a few devices. It seems smart to start testing early to show up any major problems that can be dealt with before the game gets more complex.
We’ve been testing on Android devices and have found the variety of different handsets to be something of a mind-boggler. We have mostly been testing on a shiny Galaxy 3 and… well… my Android phone, the HTC Desire.
As you’d expect, there has been little issue in the way of performance on the Galaxy 3. On the older handset, however, it has been more difficult. We are well below Unity’s recommendations for draw calls and vertex count yet it’s hard to keep the frame rate high on the Desire. We were running at around 40fps on the Galaxy 3 but the same build was at 12fps on the Desire. Maciej left in the afternoon with this message:
I will work on performance and if I can get it working on your phone then it should be fine.
I was hurt.
Later this evening Maciej has managed to get the game to run at a minimum of 20fps on the Desire, which looks just about acceptable. Unfortunately a few of the graphical flourishes are missing from this build, so we’re working on finding a good balance between speed and style for you all.
I like my HTC Desire, but apparently it’s a pain for Unity developers.
After this experience, we’re likely to be testing and launching on iOS first since there ought to be less variation in performance on the handsets and we can test on the lower spec units. We want to release as polished a game as possible at this will be easier to do first on iOS, then we can build on that experience to get a well balanced build for Android.
*Maciej has been doing pretty much all of the testing work, I have been playing with my phone and saying “make it faster”.
Bzzz 